What does citation resolution prove, and what does it not prove?

When a claim is cited, Kindred resolves the citation to a real source it actually retrieved. That is a meaningful guarantee, and it is a precise one. It is worth being clear about exactly what it does and does not establish.

The short version

Inline citations follow a simple contract. The model cites the exact URL of a source it retrieved, and Kindred's engine resolves each citation to the actual source in the retrieved pool. So a resolved citation opens the real document the claim drew on, not a guess at one.

What resolution proves

A resolved citation establishes that the source is real, that it was retrieved during your analysis, and that the citation points to that exact source in the record. It closes off the most common failure mode of AI writing, the confident citation to a document that does not exist.

Going deeper · for technical readers

Resolution is deliberately mechanical and conservative. The model is asked to cite the exact URL of a source it retrieved, never a number; echoing an exact string back is reliable in a way that looking up a number mid-generation is not. After a phase is written, Kindred matches each cited URL against the pool of sources actually retrieved for your analysis and rewrites it to that source's stable position in the record.

The match is done by a careful normalizer, not a fuzzy guess. If a cited URL cannot be matched to the retrieved pool, it is left unresolved and is never turned into a clickable link, because the record only ever links through sources that are really in the pool. So a resolved, numbered citation is one that passed this check; an unresolved one quietly does not become a link rather than pointing somewhere unverified.

What resolution does not prove

Resolution links a citation to a real retrieved source. It does not verify that the source's content actually supports the claim. Stated plainly: citations link claims to real retrieved sources, but the content of each claim is not yet mechanically verified against the source. That verification is on the roadmap. Until it exists, a resolved citation is your starting point for checking a claim, not a substitute for doing so.

The honest limit of Kindred's grounding